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You may have learned the periodic table of elements during chemistry lessons at school, but how much do you know about the man widely credited for ordering the table as we know it?

Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, honoured with a Google Doodle to celebrate what would have been his 182nd birthday, published his first version of the periodic table in 1869, years after multiple scientists had attempted to order the elements.

The doodle incorporates elements of the periodic tableCredit:
Google/Google

The reason Mendeleev's version stuck was due to his using the table as a method of predicting the existence of substances, such as gallium and germanium, that had not yet been discovered. #

He also incorporated more elements into the table than anyone previously.

Each element within the periodic table contains its atomic number, which is equal to the number of protons/electrons within the element, its atomic weight and its element symbol, consisting of one or two letters. Some versions of the table, as above, colour the elemental blocks depending on their type; noble gases, alkali metals, solid, liquid, gas etc.

Mendeleev visits a Ural steelworks in 1899

Mendeleev categorised the elements in order of relative atomic mass which he noticed was related to their chemical and physical properties, and was able to predict the atomic mass of the as-yet-undiscovered elements which belonged in the gaps of the table.

Who was Dmitri Mendeleev?

The chemist was born in the city of Tobolsk, the unofficial capital of Siberia at the time, on February 8 1834.

He studied at the Main Pedagogical Institute, before writing a book on the inner workings of the spectroscope, an instrument designed for measuring light's properties across the electromagnetic spectrum.

He later worked as a professor at both the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and the Saint Petersburg State University. His textbook Principles of Chemistry, regarded as a milestone study, was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1860.

Mendeleev had a lot of siblings

Mendeleev was the 17th child in the family of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, who was part of intelligentsia in the Siberian Region of Tobolsk.

Unfortunately, eight children died very young before he was born.

He manufactured excellent luggage

Mendeleev wasn't just a scientist. He was also known as a master of suitcase making. Mendeleev's bags were of excellent quality and highly valued among Russian merchants. In fact he was known as "Mendeleev, the famous suitcase master”.

His suitcases were put together using a special kind of glue, which Mendeleev himself discovered while studying different kinds of adhesive substances.

Mendeleev missed out on a Nobel Prize

Mendeleev was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize on three different occasions, but he was never given the prize.

Some argue that the main reason for this was due to a feud with the Nobel brothers.

He was into ships

Mendeleev had a great interest in shipbuilding and wrote over 40 scientific papers on the subject.

He also had a hand in constructing the world's first Arctic icebreaker 'Yermak', launched by the Imperial Russian Navy in 1898.

Yermak assisting the stranded warship Apraxin, 1900

'Oil be darned...'

As proponent of applied science, Mendeleev worked to improve production techniques in numerous areas.

He helped build Russia’s first oil refinery, published theories on the origin of oil and predicted that it would become a key component of the world economy

It was Mendeleev in 1863, who recommended oil companies pump oil through pipelines. Before this, oil products were transported in carts and leather bags.

By carefully studying oil products he figured out using data and numbers that oil-processing plants should be built in areas near to where petroleum products are consumed, rather than close to the oil fields themselves.

No eureka moment...

Legend has it that Mendeleev came up with the idea for his famous periodic table after he had seen it in a dream.

Mendeleev was asked if the legend was true but he replied that he had been thinking of the concept for 20 years day and night so probably not.

Dmitri Mendeleev

Futureproofing the Periodic Table

Mendeleev knew when he created the table that there were still gaps and where other elements were meant to be.

He was clever enough to predict, however, that in the future new elements would be discovered as a result of further studies and that the use of modern equipment yet to be invented would facilitate this.

Mendeleev's periodic table was highly empirical: he sorted the elements in order of atomic weight, then noticed that certain properties repeated periodically. If there was a set of properties that had a missing element in one period, he inserted an "undiscovered" element.

But NO elements were known with noble gas properties, so there were no empty "noble gas" slots for him to fill.

Mendeleev had left the noble gases out of his periodic table for a very good reason: they were not known, and there were no known elements with similar properties which would lead him to suspect that they existed.

“To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal,” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry, said.

No stranger to controversy

In 1862, at the age of 43, Mendeleev fell in love with a 19-year-old woman and asked his first wife Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva for a divorce.

In Orthodox Russia divorce was both shunned and complicated. When the marriage was terminated, the church forbade Mendeleev from wedding again for six years, but he violated the prohibition to a great deal of public uproar.

His failure to be elected into Russia’s Academy of Science at the time was probably a result of this.

Mendeleev died in 1907 aged 72 and Element 101, mendelevium, is named after him.